Anamorphic Lens Flare

Update: I’ve just pushed a new SWF with a much better enhanced effect. I’ve tweaked things like the number of vertical/horizontal blur passes – which are now up to 3/6 – but also the flares’ brightness, contrast and dirt texture. I think it looks way better now!

Tonight’s experiment was focused on post-processing. My goal was to implement a simple anamorphic lens flare post-processing effect using Minko. It was actually quite simple to do. Here is the result:

Then I use a multipass Gaussian blur with 4 passes: 3 horizontal passes and 1 vertical passes. The trick is to apply those 5 passes (1 luminance threshold pass + 4 blur passes) on a texture which is a lot taller than wide (32×1024 in this case). This way, everything gets streched when the flare are composited with the rest of the backbuffer.